Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not
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You can digitize the books you own. You do not need a license for that. And of course you could put that digital format into a database. As databases are explicit exceptions from copyright law. If you want to go to the extreme: delete first copy. Then you have only in the database. However: AIs/LLMs are not based on data bases. But on neural networks. The original data gets lost when "learned".
If you want to go to the extreme: delete first copy.
You can; as I understand it, the only legal requirement is that you only use one copy at a time.
ie. I can give my book to a friend after I'm done reading it; I can make a copy of a book and keep them at home and at the office and switch off between reading them; I'm not allowed to make a copy of the book hand one to a friend and then both of us read it at the same time.
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I am not sure what your contention, or gotcha, is with the comment above but they are quite correct. And additionally chose quite an apt example with video compression since in most ways current 'AI' effectively functions as a compression algorithm, just for our language corpora instead of video.
They seem pretty different to me.
Video compression developers go through a lot of effort to make them deterministic. We don't necessarily care that a particular video stream compresses to a particular bit sequence but we very much care that the resulting decompression gets you as close to the original as possible.
AIs will rarely produce exact replicas of anything. They synthesize outputs from heterogeneous training data. That sounds like learning to me.
The one area where there's some similarity is dimensionality reduction. Its technically a form of compression, since it makes your files smaller. It would also be an extremely expensive way to get extremely bad compression. It would take orders of magnitude more hardware resources and the images are likely to be unrecognizable.
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The judge isn't saying that they learn or that they're people. He's saying that training falls into the same legal classification as learning.
Which doesn’t make any sense.
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It cant speak or use any words without it being someone elses words it learned from? Unless its giving sources everything is always from something it learned because it cannot speak or use words without that source in the first place?
prompt: Make up a word that is not found anywhere on the internet. If I do a search for that word, it should not exist. Provide example usage.
Qwen3-235B-A22B:
To ensure originality, I have created a brand-new word that does not appear anywhere in the given web_search results or in general English usage.
Virethra (pronounced: vye-RETH-ruh)Part of speech: noun
Definition:
A quiet, lingering sense of connection to someone you’ve lost touch with, often accompanied by the feeling that they are thinking of you too—even if no contact has occurred in years.Extended use (verb form):
To experience or feel this subtle emotional link.
Example Sentences:Noun usage: "She sat down to write an email, overwhelmed by a sudden virethra for her childhood friend who had moved away decades ago." Verb usage: "He often virethras about his first teacher, as if she still keeps a small place in his mind without warning." Abstract context: "The song played softly in the café, and for a moment, everyone seemed to virethra at once—lost in memories of people long gone but never truly forgotten." -
Ok so you can buy books scan them or ebooks and use for AI training but you can't just download priated books from internet to train AI. Did I understood that correctly ?
That's my understanding too. If you obtained them legally, you can use them the same way anyone else who obtained them legally could use them.
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Can I not just ask the trained AI to spit out the text of the book, verbatim?
They aren’t capable of that. This is why you sometimes see people comparing AI to compression, which is a bad faith argument. Depending on the training, AI can make something that is easily recognizable as derivative, but is not identical or even “lossy” identical. But this scenario takes place in a vacuum that doesn’t represent the real world. Unfortunately, we are enslaved by Capitalism, which means the output, which is being sold for-profit, is competing with the very content it was trained upon. This is clearly a violation of basic ethical principles as it actively harms those people whose content was used for training.
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Make an AI that is trained on the books.
Tell it to tell you a story for one of the books.
Read the story without paying for it.
The law says this is ok now, right?
Sort of.
If you violated laws in obtaining the book (eg stole or downloaded it without permission) it's illegal and you've already violated the law, no matter what you do after that.
If you obtain the book legally you can do whatever you want with that book, by the first sale doctrine. If you want to redistribute the book, you need the proper license. You don't need any licensing to create a derivative work. That work has to be "sufficiently transformed" in order to pass.
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Formatting thing: if you start a line in a new paragraph with four spaces, it assumes that you want to display the text as a code and won't line break.
This means that the last part of your comment is a long line that people need to scroll to see. If you remove one of the spaces, or you remove the empty line between it and the previous paragraph, it'll look like a normal comment
With an empty line of space:
1 space - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.
2 spaces - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.
3 spaces - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.
4 spaces - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.wrote on last edited by [email protected]Personally I prefer to explicitly wrap the text in backticks.
Three ` symbols will
Have the same effectBut the behavior is more clear to the author
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Ask a human to draw an orc. How do they know what an orc looks like? They read Tolkien's books and were "inspired" Peter Jackson's LOTR.
Unpopular opinion, but that's how our brains work.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!
>.>
<.<
::: spoiler spoiler
I was inspired by the sometimes hilarious dnd splatbooks, thank you very much.
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Except learning in this context is building a probability map reinforcing the exact text of the book. Given the right prompt, no new generative concepts come out, just the verbatim book text trained on.
So it depends on the model I suppose and if the model enforces generative answers and blocks verbatim recitation.
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But I thought they admitted to torrenting terabytes of ebooks?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]FaceBook did but technically downloading (leeching) isn't illegal but distributing (seeding) is and they did not seed.
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How they don't use same words as in the book ? That's not how LLM works. They use exactly same words if the probabilities align. It's proved by this study. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12546
I'd say there are two issues with it.
FIrst, it's a very new article with only 3 citations. The authors seem like serious researchers but the paper itself is still in the, "hot off the presses" stage and wouldn't qualify as "proven" yet.
It also doesn't exactly say that books are copies. It says that in some models, it's possible to extract some portions of some texts. They cite "1984" and "Harry Potter" as two books that can be extracted almost entirely, under some circumstances. They also find that, in general, extraction rates are below 1%.
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And this is how you know that the American legal system should not be trusted.
Mind you I am not saying this an easy case, it's not. But the framing that piracy is wrong but ML training for profit is not wrong is clearly based on oligarch interests and demands.
If this is the ruling which causes you to lose trust that any legal system (not just the US') aligns with morality, then I have to question where you've been all this time.
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Your very first statement calling my basis for my argument incorrect is incorrect lol.
LLMs “learn” things from the content they consume. They don’t just take the content in wholesale and keep it there to regurgitate on command.
On your last part, unless someone uses AI to recreate the tone etc of a best selling author and then markets their book/writing as being from said best selling author, and doesn’t use trademarked characters etc, there’s no issue. You can’t copyright a style of writing.
I'll repeat what you said with emphasis:
AI can “learn” from and “read” a book in the same way a person can and does
The emphasized part is incorrect. It's not the same, yet your argument seems to be that because (your claim) it is the same, then it's no different from a human reading all of these books.
Regarding your last point, copyright law doesn't just kick in because you try to pass something off as an original (by, for ex, marketing a book as being from a best selling author). It applies based on similarity whether you mention the original author or not.
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i will train my jailbroken kindle too...display and storage training... i'll just libgen them...no worries...it is not piracy
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Even if we accept all your market liberal premise without question... in your own rhetorical framework the Disney lawsuit should be ruled against Disney.
If a human uses AI to recreate the exact tone, structure and other nuances of say, some best selling author, they harm the marketability of the original works which fails fair use tests (at least in the US).
Says who? In a free market why is the competition from similar products and brands such a threat as to be outlawed? Think reasonably about what you are advocating... you think authorship is so valuable or so special that one should be granted a legally enforceable monopoly at the loosest notions of authorship. This is the definition of a slippery-slope, and yet, it is the status quo of the society we live in.
On it "harming marketability of the original works," frankly, that's a fiction and anyone advocating such ideas should just fucking weep about it instead of enforce overreaching laws on the rest of us. If you can't sell your art because a machine made "too good a copy" of your art, it wasn't good art in the first place and that is not the fault of the machine. Even big pharma doesn't get to outright ban generic medications (even tho they certainly tried)... it is patently fucking absurd to decry artist's lack of a state-enforced monopoly on their work. Why do you think we should extend such a radical policy towards... checks notes... tumblr artists and other commission based creators? It's not good when big companies do it for themselves through lobbying, it wouldn't be good to do it for "the little guy," either. The real artists working in industry don't want to change the law this way because they know it doesn't work in their favor. Disney's lawsuit is in the interest of Disney and big capital, not artists themselves, despite what these large conglomerates that trade in IPs and dreams might try to convince the art world writ large of.
you think authorship is so valuable or so special that one should be granted a legally enforceable monopoly at the loosest notions of authorship
Yes, I believe creative works should be protected as that expression has value and in a digital world it is too simple to copy and deprive the original author of the value of their work. This applies equally to Disney and Tumblr artists.
I think without some agreement on the value of authorship / creation of original works, it's pointless to respond to the rest of your argument.
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If what you are saying is true, why were these ‘AI’s” incapable of rendering a full wine glass? It ‘knows’ the concept of a full glass of water, but because of humanities social pressures, a full wine glass being the epitome of gluttony, art work did not depict a full wine glass, no matter how ai prompters demanded, it was unable to link the concepts until it was literally created for it to regurgitate it out. It seems ‘AI’ doesn’t really learn, but regurgitates art out in collages of taken assets, smoothed over at the seams.
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If I understand correctly they are ruling you can by a book once, and redistribute the information to as many people you want without consequences. Aka 1 student should be able to buy a textbook and redistribute it to all other students for free. (Yet the rules only work for companies apparently, as the students would still be committing a crime)
They may be trying to put safeguards so it isn't directly happening, but here is an example that the text is there word for word:
That's not at all what this ruling says, or what LLMs do.
Copyright covers a specific concrete expression. It doesn't cover the information that the expression conveys. So if I paint a portrait of myself, that portrait is covered by copyright. If someone looks at the portrait and says "this is a portrait of a tall, dark, handsome deer-creature of some sort with awesome antlers" they haven't violated that copyright even if they're accurately conveying the same information that the portrait is conveying.
The ruling does cover the assumption that the LLM "contains" the training text, which was asserted by the Authors and was not contested by Anthropic. The judge ruled that even if this assertion is true it doesn't matter. The LLM is sufficiently transformative to count as a new work.
If you have an LLM reproduce a copyrighted text, the text is still copyrighted. That doesn't change. Just like if a human re-wrote it word-for-word from memory.
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It can, the only thing stopping it is if it is specifically told not to, and this consideration is successfully checked for. It is completely capable of plagiarizing otherwise.
For the purposes of this ruling it doesn't actually matter. The Authors claimed that this was the case and the judge said "sure, for purposes of argument I'll assume that this is indeed the case." It didn't change the outcome.
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Bro are you a robot yourself? Does that look like a glass full of wine?
If someone ask for a glass of water you don't fill it all the way to the edge. This is way overfull compared to what you're supposed to serve.
